Optimizely Content Cloud
Top Rated
Optimizely Content Cloud
Overview
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Popular Features
View all 16 features- Role-based user permissions (38)8.888%
- WYSIWYG editor (38)8.080%
- Admin section (39)7.878%
- Code quality / cleanliness (38)7.878%
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Pricing
View all pricingEntry-level set up fee?
- Setup fee optional
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting / Integration Services
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Features Scorecard
Security
8.8
88%
Platform & Infrastructure
7.3
73%
Web Content Creation
7.0
70%
Web Content Management
6.8
68%
Product Details
What is Optimizely Content Cloud?
Optimizely combines a creative experience with artificial intelligence to personalize and orchestrate customer journeys. Optimizely Content Cloud hosts a content management system with AI-driven personalization that enables the user to deliver individualized content to each visitor. The solution helps define creative recommendations, artificial intelligence, assisted segmentation and contextual data personalize experiences can be created with minimal effort. The vendor states its results are a higher ROI, quicker conversions, improved lead generation, and better customer service.
Optimizely Content Cloud Features
Web Content Creation Features
- Supported: WYSIWYG editor
- Supported: Code quality / cleanliness
- Supported: Content versioning
- Supported: Admin section
- Supported: Page templates
- Supported: Library of website themes
- Supported: Mobile optimization / responsive design
- Supported: Publishing workflow
- Supported: Form generator
- Supported: Content scheduling
Web Content Management Features
- Supported: Internal content search
- Supported: Content taxonomy
- Supported: SEO support
- Supported: Browser compatibility
- Supported: Bulk management
- Supported: Page caching
- Supported: Availability / breadth of extensions
- Supported: Built-in e-commerce / shopping cart
- Supported: E-commerce / shopping cart extension
- Supported: Community / comment management
- Supported: Import / export
- Supported: Website analytics
Platform & Infrastructure Features
- Supported: API
- Supported: Internationalization / multi-language
Security Features
- Supported: Role-based user permissions
- Supported: Multi-factor authentication
- Supported: User-level audit trail
- Supported: Version history
- Supported: Simple roll-back capabilities
CMS programming language or framework Features
- Supported: .NET
Additional Features
- Supported: Intelligent autocomplete - suggests common search terms and promotes search terms that give higher conversion rates without manual involvement
- Supported: Advanced language technology and behavioral tracking - finds all content in any source: pages, blocks, products, people and documents – to deliver relevant search results
- Supported: Sophisticated faceting - lets the visitor drill down into search results
Optimizely Content Cloud Screenshots
Optimizely Content Cloud Video
Optimizely Content Cloud Downloadables
Optimizely Content Cloud Integrations
Optimizely Content Cloud Competitors
Optimizely Content Cloud Customer Size Distribution
Consumers | 0% |
---|---|
Small Businesses (1-50 employees) | 0% |
Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees) | 62% |
Enterprises (more than 500 employees) | 38% |
Optimizely Content Cloud Technical Details
Deployment Types | On-premise, SaaS |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Windows |
Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Sitecore Experience Manager, Adobe Experience Manager, and Progress Sitefinity are common alternatives for Optimizely Content Cloud.
Reviewers rate Role-based user permissions highest, with a score of 8.8.
The most common users of Optimizely Content Cloud are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees) and the Information Technology & Services industry.
Comparisons
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January 10, 2022
How Optimizely (Episerver) compares 3 years later
We deliver engaging actionable content and experiences for our membership. It enables us to strengthen, grow our brand authority, develop new digital solutions, and increase global growth.
- Develop and build new website content
- Organize website architecture
- Identify issues and resolve them rapidly
- Manage media assets effectively
- Provides an agile, dynamic means to deliver an experience
- Enables the end user/customer to create new layouts or templates
- Excessive developer costs are needed to support any changes to blocks, templates, functionality.
- Free training to offset high support costs and unlock community of developers.
- Specialized Agencies and Developers are needed at a high cost to build or create new functionality.
- No efficient means to manage URL redirects automatically or generate batch redirects for major architectural improvements.
- Language translation is extremely cumbersome if translating an existing website. Manual block by block, page by a page process.
At this level, you are in the big leagues. Unless your organization is prepared to hire an Optimizely experienced development team, you cannot just buy the platform and suddenly be a content wizard. You most likely will need to partner with a digital experience agency to undergo a discovery review. Determine what problems as an organization you need solving. Through this collaborative discovery process, that agency (if they have an Optimizely dev team and should) will work with all stakeholders throughout the organization to develop a solution that solves those major problems for your users external and internal. You're looking at roughly 6 months end to end to do this right. 3 months if you have a stellar dev team or many experienced resources. Trying to shoehorn out an MVT solution in a shorter time frame without that stellar team typically leads to greater costs post-launch to cover all the shortcomings of the CMS that should have been included for launch, angered senior leadership, and unhappy users.
January 06, 2022
Create content according to the customer's taste with the intelligence of a powerful CMS
Optimizely [Content Cloud] is the very efficient CMS product I ever used, I would say it had everything to offer business and fulfilled the business requirement. as did come across any sever issues that would showcase as problems with respect to optimizelly CMS edit and development experience . I believe there could be a scope of use case but primarily not certain about it
- Implementation Project
- Epi forms
- Block and pages
- Rich text blocks
I am not sure about the implementation as it was implemented [by] it development team, it would be difficult for me to comment on the implantation part area, I could make comments about my experience for the use of CMS for the editing purpose and IAM purpose, which is awesome, as I have experience of more than 3 years on working with CMS product
January 06, 2022
Our experience with Optimizely (former EpiServer)
We use Optimizely Content Cloud to host one website and a content library. We are in process of migrating additional sites from Sitecore and Wordpress to EPI (Optimizely).
- Easy Deployments and Managements
- Excellent support: assistance with deployments, account management, and other tasks.
- High reliability
- The names of the products and features could be confusing to new users.
- If you start implementing Content Cloud, adding E-Commerce functionality may not be easy. In our case, we lost several days because we decided to add support for future e-commerce implementation. We had to do significant application changes to accommodate this.
- The email marketing functionality is not as Clear Cut as competitors (MailChimp etc.)
It took us almost 1-year to launch our first website. However, the delays were caused by internal constraints.
September 30, 2021
Having Spent Many Years With the Product, Can You Believe I Still Speak Highly of It?
We have set up content authoring teams with different permissions. There are people whose job it is to simply curate content, but they need to have it reviewed and do not publish themselves. There are people who approve the work of content authors and also schedule the publishing of content when it makes sense to do so. Then, there are people in the viewers' group. They can see content before it's published and can give opinions on legal-speak, etc. Other groups are assigned specific permissions for special parts of the site. We also have multiple sites. This means additional teams are responsible for their own complete site content. They can run A/B tests, use shared content blocks between sites, or have custom functionality built for them specifically for their needs. Older static sites are easily migrated into the CMS, leveraging the power of the CMS and freeing up developers from having to maintain basic site content on behalf of the business stakeholders. This means they can be more focused on solving real business problems.
- It's easy and fun to use. You can take someone with no experience in content management and they pick it up very quickly.
- It is capable of managing multiple sites in multiple languages.
- It has good uptime. Deployments are easy and with hot-swapping, you would never know the site was being updated in the background.
- The searching capabilities are excellent. Not only can it index your own site but other content as well.
- The user guide could be fleshed out more.
- Its out-of-the-box functionality isn't always truly out-of-the-box. You are given a working skeleton and left to flesh out much more than would be preferred.
- The user interface is extendable, meaning it can be changed and customized. However, it is difficult and tricky.
Let's talk about the Alloy Demo Site. Developers can spin up a fully functional demo site in minutes. It can be used to test ideas as a sandbox to play around in. Plus, the source code gives pointers in the right direction. Small projects can be done in weeks and larger ones take months. It takes longer to finalize the design than it does to build the templates and the blocks. What also takes time is understanding what you can get out of the product in terms of leveraging its capabilities. Often, more time is spent on how it looks than how it's meant to work. More effort spent on leveraging the search functionality and designing the site structure really pays off.
September 23, 2021
Easy to Use!
Our marketing and digital delivery teams use it to manage our business's two websites. It addresses our content storage use by allowing us to house all of our content in one place. It also provides a simple and easy-to-use CMS for us to be able to make changes on our sites without any development.
- Content management
- Webpage customization
- Ease of use
- Forms could be easier to configure - they take a long time to set up.
- Allow us to configure the width of blocks within the block - we should not have to go back a page to change the size of it.
September 22, 2021
A Solid Enterprise-Grade CMS
Optimizely Content Cloud is being used to manage several websites across the company's digital estate. It provides an excellent content management system for our brochureware sites, with a number of contributors able to simultaneously add new and edit existing landing pages, articles, and press releases.
- Scheduling
- Versioning
- Multi-site
- Previews
- Media management
- Optimization
It was implemented within three months of acquisition.
August 23, 2021
Happy with the Technology, Not so Much with Support
We use [Optimizely Content Cloud] as the platform for most of our sites. We started with around 10 sites and will expand in the future.
- Best-in-class technology
- Easy to integrate
- Well-received by users
- In my opinion, there is really poor support during the integration phase.
- In my opinion, there is a lack of responsiveness by Epi support over time. Are they too busy for clients?
In my opinion, the [Optimizely Content Cloud] implementation team was inadequate, and it took quite a while to figure out how to sync with support.
August 11, 2021
Loving Content Cloud Flexibility!
We implement [Optimizely Content Cloud (formerly Episerver Content Cloud)] for our customers to be used paired with Commerce Cloud as a e-commerce and marketing platform. [Optimizely] Content Cloud is used to allow personalization of content and flexibility[.]
- Personalization
- Flexibility
- A/B Testing
- Speed
- Responsive
- Drag and drop layouts
About 1 month or 2
July 25, 2021
So happy with the company, I'm buying it again.
We started small, using it to host our learning center content and marketing landing pages. We've been able to achieve great results and are moving forward with making Optimizely our CMS for all websites in our organization.
- Personalization
- Innovation
- Intuitive content authoring
- Recent acquisitions are not fully integrated into the solution, so the experience can be a bit choppy.
- Built in A/B testing product is lacking in features that make it useful.
- I would like to see better built-in reporting options for analyzing content.
- I would like an option to import content via CSV spreadsheet or export fields via CSV.
We used a partner to help us stand up a small site within 90 days. I highly recommend using an experienced partner. This is not a DIY solution.
We use the CMS to keep our customers up to date with editorial content. The content is news that can span current events that have an effect on travel, and/or currencies. It is developed by our internal development team, and all the content is edited by a team of content managers.
- Easy to use editor for creating content
- Good forum for help when developing the backend
- Good control over who can do what, and in what stage of publishing
- The deployment process feels like it could be streamlined
- Weird caching issues when removing attributes on pages
I was not part of the initial setup process, so I am not sure about this.
We utilize Optimizely (Episerver) as the primary content management system (CMS) for all of our website environments. The system is managed by a team in our IT department, and marketing has a team of Web Content specialists and administrators who oversee the content implementation strategies. My team also provides CMS training to other individuals throughout our organization who need to make regular updates to their web pages. We have a variety of websites supported by this platform, including five major brands, a list of subdomains, and our testing environments used by our developers.
- Easy to navigate between pages and across domains.
- Block-based page building makes it easy to house media/content assets and apply shared content to multiple pages.
- Robust administrative/developer features make it possible to manage backend tasks.
- Optimizely/Episerver could improve the functionality for managing redirects to address conflicting redirects, possible redirect chains, and if existing redirects are being overwritten.
- Optimizely/Episerver could also make it easier to manage old or no longer used blocks and contest assets. We are facing a maintenance issue in our organization where there are many old contest assets that remain on our CMS.
I am not sure as I joined the organization after this product had already been implemented.
July 20, 2021
An great simple solution with room to grow
Optimizely Content Cloud [(formerly Episerver Content Cloud)] is currently utilized as a CMS primarily by our Marketing and IT departments in our organization. It handles the managing of users, customer accounts and integration jobs.
- Managing Users
- Managing Customers
- Order Management
- Job Integration - it's very easy to find and edit jobs if the pre-requisited skills are available.
- Product Line vs Brand vs Manufacturer delineation, the website is built mainly to support brands and doesn't really differentiate when it comes to features (such as brand supplier pages) which is challenging especially when it comes to brand vs manufacturer. You might want to have both a manufacturer page and a brand page for a product which isn't really supported.
- With a very large database (over 1.5 million products), there can be some unique bugs, such as slowness or freezing when searching for products. There are workarounds such as by using the filter button instead.
- Could really use a "Product List" feature, so that products can be added to a list and then a customer landing page can be built for that list and email campaigns targeting that list can be used.
It took about 3 months to get up and running with Optimizely [Content Cloud (formerly Episerver Content Cloud)] and then about a year to get fully going. This implementation was in combination with implementing a new PIM with a huge product base that made any kind of process change extremely complex. We worked with an web integration company to help simplify this process.
July 20, 2021
A Decent Content Tool, But Not a Magic Wand
Our marketing department uses the program on our main e-commerce website to help better understand the content on our website and what we should change/develop moving forward. Specifically, we use it to make decisions on content for personalization features on our website as well as help inform decisions related to content development for our engineering customers. We don't have another tool that can easily produce the data in the format that Optimizely Content Cloud does, so this fills that gap.
- Easy to create categories of different types of content for more targeted analysis
- Provides graphs that show which content topics are "hottest" or most relevant
- Takes data available elsewhere (like Google Analytics) and presents it in a more helpful, content-focused way
- The tool is not intuitive, I had to schedule time with an expert to ask clarifying questions
- It pulls lots of words and phrases that are completely irrelevant
- It does not provide solutions - only a different view of your data. So it's really just a starting point for content development.
We're still figuring it out, but so far we've been collecting data for a year and only recently started digging into the data. Implementation was super quick. We worked with a agency to get it started. Otherwise, we're just performing improvements now as we better understand how to use the tool to improve customer experience.
June 12, 2020
Episerver CMS--worth a try
Episerver is widely used in our organization, and we are using it to provide services to b2b customers (large building companies) and b2c customers (bathrooms) and for internal users (sales material, product data).
- Easy to use, low learning curve
- Customization is easy
- World class product
- We will need developer to install nuggets :(.
- In-river integrations were not as good as expected.
- No marketing automation or user analytics included
Yes
Updating Episerver for dev is easy, with little or no downtime at all.
June 12, 2020
My 5 cents on Episerver
Episerver CMS is used in the whole organization. We have around 200 editors. It solves the overall communication for students, employees, and visitors. The solution has many integrations with other systems for example education information, jobs, student record information. It solves many problems for both users and editors. For example, we use Episerver for creating welcome letters for new students. Previously this was done manually with pdf:s, tables, and HTML pages. This has saved a lot of time for the editors but it also gives the students a better experience. We have also created a student web that collects student records, courses, schema, etc. in one place. This makes it very easy for the student to find information and it has reduced questions to our service department with 30 %.
- Edit pages and blocks
- Episerver FIND integration
- Stability of the platform
- Faster in edit mode
- Clean up the admin mode
- Improve epi forms
June 11, 2020
Episerver CMS Review
We are developing Episerver solutions for our customers. It's usually used by the whole organization but represented by a small group of editors. We allways work from a user perspective. We want to increase KPI, increase ROI, and have happy users for our customers. The problems or possibilities depend on our customers' business areas, but we always feel that we can tune Episerver to solve our problems.
- Content management, versioning, publish workflows
- Language handlring, setup for enterprise companies
- Continues product updates
- Active community
- SEO features
- Support for enterprise companies that are using bulk publish with "Projects"
- Redirect support, 301
- Accessibility features
June 11, 2020
Great CMS for large companies
It is our main CMS system across the organization. We are currently moving all of our old websites to our new Episerver CMS platform.
- User friendly
- Customizable (with the help of developers from our partner agency)
- We experience performance issues from time to time.
- It can be a bit tricky sometimes to manage multiple languages (without anyone breaking anything), but that might be our implementation.
- The translation function (Projects) could be improved.
We use Episerver as the host for our primary marketing website. We Self-Hosted, moved to DXC Cloud service offering and now back to Self-Hosting.
- Site tree navigation
- Developer ramp up time
- Ease of deployment
- Antiquated .Net technology
- Headless documentation is limiting
- Cloud offering not as strong as self hosting
- Company focus on addons vs product improvement
Yes
Upgrading from a 2 year old version to current 2 years ago was pretty much a re-write. Ongoing upgrades have been flawless and occur on every deployment.
June 11, 2020
Episerver makes my day easier
We use Episerver for our webbpage. We work on 5 different markets and sell to both b2b and b2c and Episerver CMS is perfect for this purpose.
It’s mainly our marketing department that works in the platform. But in some cases we also have a customer service rep that makes changes inside Episerver. Also, the marketing agency works inside Episerver.
- Easy to understand
- Great plugins and tools
- Good preview-mode.
- Better dashboard and statistic
- Better translation tool without plugins.
- More customizable workspace
Episerver CMS is primarily used as a tool, in conjunction with Episerver Commerce, to provide content, information, and products to our bicycling customers. Episerver CMS provides page and block formats in which our marketing department formulates content for consumers and the back-end CMS the tooling necessary to execute. The CMS system is primarily used by our content management team, associated with our marketing department, and solves our need to have a system accessible to the less technical members of our staff.
- Allows for easy content updating by less technical members
- Provides avenues for improving and customizing the underlying system
- Executes quickly for fast rendering to end-users
- A more tightly integrated E-Commerce set of tools
- Improvement of the back-end runtime speed
- More out of the box visualization options for interface development
June 11, 2020
Episerver CMS Review
We use Episerver CMS for all our web platforms. It helps us to reach out with information to the citizens of Stockholm. It is easy to build available pages with Episerver CMS.
- Building structures
- Manage images
- It makes the content intuitive for the user
- Easy for an editor to work with
- Would be nice if we were able to insert our own help texts into the Administration interface (to help our editors)
- Users should be able to comment on pages
- Would be nice with a built-in feature for managing maps
It maintains 75% of our company websites with the plan to convert all the websites to Episerver. It is being used by our Marketing and Merchandising departments.
- Ease and ability to make changes to Website content.
- Easy to maintain.
- Non-technical staff are able to understand the how the website is configured.
- A better explanation of Security/Permissions for Functions. It was a trial by fire to determine which area each Permission controlled. I had to create a spreadsheet turn off and on specific areas and document what was taken away as access. It was very time-consuming.
- Speaking of permissions for functions, the design could be better. The EDIT button does not align properly to the given permission.
June 11, 2020
New Consultant With First time Exposure to Episerver
We are using Episerver for all of our sites on the Polaris Platform. It's used by the front end and ecommerce solutions/teams. It addresses how to manage multiple sites with content and distribute that content at a rapidly changing pace. We utilize over 30 brands and each site has it's own flavor/flair that Episerver helps support. We are also looking at capitalizing Insight Profiles with time to improve our purchase utilization.
- Content Management
- Development Documentation
- Multi-environment Testing/development
- Default settings get reset/not easily managed
- Support when there are defects is slow
- Easier way to search through large chunks of content
June 11, 2020
Episerver at Systembolaget
We use Episerver CMS for both our external CMS-based systems and also for our Intranet. The system is used by all our editors in different departments. We also have a close relationship to our development department that builds our CMS-solutions and integrations.
- The GUI for Editors
- The possibility to customize functionality and user interface
- The flexibility to use Episerver in own Azure environment is not supported so well
January 06, 2020
Meets Our Very Specific Needs
Episerver CMS is used across the whole organization but is mainly managed by my department - the communications department. Our entire website is run through Episerver, and each department is responsible for keeping their part of the website updated with current information, as far as making small edits (like text edits). Then the communications department oversees all of those changes and is in charge of making more involved updates (adding entirely new content, creating new pages, moving things around, etc).
- Allows many different "users" with varying levels of editing access.
- Easy to see what recent changes have been made and who made them.
- The website, including the editing portion, seems to be down quite often - so that we cannot make changes - or it allows us to make changes but then doesn't properly save them.
- Customer service and user support is lacking. We've reported problems to them, yet it never seems to get fixed.